It's usually silly to get upset about the self-righteous way Hollywood moviemakers routinely turn serious subjects into baby food.

But enough about the lies in Selma!

Speaking of talking about one movie and hoping that we ignore how the rest panders to Taibbi's far-left politics, check out this quote:

This is the same Hollywood culture that turned the horror and divisiveness of the Vietnam War era into a movie about a platitude-spewing doofus with leg braces who in the face of terrible moral choices eats chocolates and plays Ping-Pong

Of course, there are so many other great movies about Vietnam that Taibbi doesn't notice also never mentions the divisiveness of the Vietnam War. Hey, do you think that Taibbi ever complained that Full Metal Jacket failed to express how at the time of the film the American public was in favour of the war? Or that the "horror" of the Tet offensive was excatly the opposite of how it was portrayed in the film? Of course not! That film worked just fine toward's Taibbi's extreme biases so it gets a pass. American Sniper doesn't have the exact same political stance as he does, so he hates it.

He almost admits it in the review, if you can slog through it.

No one expected 20 minutes of backstory about the failed WMD search, Abu Ghraib, or the myriad other American atrocities and quick-trigger bombings that helped fuel the rise of ISIL and other groups.

Of course, the cynic may note that if Matt wants his kind of Iraq war movie, he only has to look at absolutelyeveryothermoviemadeabouttheIraqandAfghanwarssinceGeorgeW.Bush(pbuh) took office. American Sniper isn't even that particularly pro-war, but that it doesn't completely hang on the left-wing reservation (much like Team America, come to think of it) causes Taibbi to lose all sense of proportion. Watching a movie that forces him to think about his bankrupt ideas, he instead lashes out that somebody dared back a movie glorifying military heroism.

Eastwood plays for cheap applause and goes super-dumb even by Hollywood standards when one of Kyle's officers suggests that they could "win the war" by taking out the evil sniper who is upsetting America's peaceful occupation of Sadr City.

As dumb things said in war movies, not even sure this meets the top ten: Kyle was almost certainly using a little rhetorical flourish to motivate the other soldiers. Taibbi should know all about rhetorical flourish, seeing how he threw in the cheap "peaceful occupation of Sadr City" snark at the end there. Sadr City wasn't peaceful, no. It was being terrorized by bloodythirsty Muslims under the control of a violence-loving extremist. Not sure what part of the death squads founded on the age-old Shia-Sunni conflict Taibbi thinks is America's fault, exactly.

When hunky Bradley Cooper's Kyle character subsequently takes out Mustafa with Skywalkerian long-distance panache – "Aim small, hit small," he whispers, prior to executing an impossible mile-plus shot – even the audiences in the liberal-ass Jersey City theater where I watched the movie stood up and cheered. I can only imagine the response this scene scored in Soldier of Fortune country.

Why is Taibbi against people cheering when the good guys beat the bad guys? Why is he so especially against it when the good guys are the same people in the audience? Would he object in the middle of San Fransisco if a bunch of faggots cheered when Sean Penn won a seat on the Board of Supervisors? Of course the audience is supposed to like the good guy winning. The problem with Taibbi here is that he doesn't think the good guy is good: he's convinced that the professional army of one of the world's oldest democracies are brutal savages, while the actual savages who haven't read a book in their life not penned by either Mohammed or Hitler are sweet kids in his neighbourhood. This sort of backwards thinking means that when he sees a movie whose politics aren't similarly backwards, he's thrown into vertigo and prone to making ridiculous claims about how the Middle East works:

The problem of course is that there's no such thing as "winning" the War on Terror militarily. In fact the occupation led to mass destruction, hundreds of thousands of deaths, a choleric lack of real sanitation, epidemic unemployment and political radicalization that continues to this day to spread beyond Iraq's borders.

Yet the movie glosses over all of this, and makes us think that killing Mustafa was some kind of decisive accomplishment – the single shot that kept terrorists out of the coffee shops of San Francisco or whatever. It's a scene that ratified every idiot fantasy of every yahoo with a target rifle from Seattle to Savannah.

If there's no such thing as "winning" the war militarily, is there similarly no such thing as "losing" it? If true, than how does Taibbi explain all the enemy forces -- those would be the bad guys, it feels necessary to explain it to him -- fighting against the US? Why don't they realize that the war is "unwinnable" and give up first? If it isn't true, then the only lesson to learn is that the Middle East is so screwed up by the sick Mohammedian philosophy of its residents that the United States has to avoid making the perfect the enemy of the good. If there are Muslim terrorists in the Middle East, it needs to kill them. If that action creates more terrorists, then they all have to be killed too. Either the number of Muslim crazies dries up and the population remaining is able to form a functioning society, or the number of Muslim crazies equals the total population in which case why are we even bothering with snipers? Just nuke them all and finish the job. If Taibbi thinks rubble don't cause trouble he should just say so. If he doesn't, then logic dictates that the military goals the US Army has in the region may be solved by sniper. In other words, the killing of Mustafa is a decisive accomplishment. In other other words, killing Mustafa serves America's interests whether it impacts hipsters in coffee shops or not. If that's an "idiot fantasy" then what do you call Taibbi's fantasy that Iraq was a bad idea and that George W. Bush (pbuh) was in the wrong for going there? Infantile fantasy? Probably.

The really dangerous part of this film is that it turns into a referendum on the character of a single soldier. It's an unwinnable argument in either direction. We end up talking about Chris Kyle and his dilemmas, and not about the Rumsfelds and Cheneys and other officials up the chain who put Kyle and his high-powered rifle on rooftops in Iraq and asked him to shoot women and children

Donald Rumsfeld never asked Chris Kyle to shoot children. I'm not sure how often Taibbi needs to be reminded of this. He seems dumb enough that you could brand that phrase into his forehad and put him in a room full of mirrors without figuring it out. As for the "high up the chain officials", I don't know how they do things at Rolling Stone magazine, but in both the army and the civilian real world, high up the chain officials are the ones who make strategic decisions. Do random copy editors over there get to decide to, say, fire Matt Taibbia? No? You mean that officials high up the chain just put them and their high-powered Photoshop into a tiny room and ask them to crop shots of women and children? That's barbaric.

Look, it's clear from this that Taibbi doesn't think there's a problem that can't be solved by unicorn farts and community organizers. He's retarded for thinking this, but then again, he does claim that American Sniper is "almost too dumb to criticize". Turnabout is fair play, innit?